The rocks shifted under our feet with every step, ancient ice making treacherous what should have been solid stone. Wind howled through the peaks like something alive and angry, carrying with it the bite of storms that never ended on the other side of the range. My tracking party moved in practiced silence behind me, weapons ready, eyes scanning for threats that usually came in the form of predators or rockslides.
Not falling metal pods from the sky.
“Lord Rezor.” Vax moved up beside me, his bulk somehow graceful despite the difficult terrain. My lead guard had the build of someone who’d spent his life training for battles, and the scars to prove he’d survived more than hisshare of them. “The lookout said it came down hard. Probably nothing but wreckage.”
“Probably,” I agreed, but I didn’t slow my pace. Something in my gut told me this was different. Important. The kind of moment that changed things, whether you wanted it to or not. I always listened to my gut and so far, it had not guided me wrong.
We’d spotted the object from our southern lookout tower at midday, less than a quarter sun-cycle ago. A streak of fire and metal had torn through the sky, trailing smoke and what looked like pieces of itself. It had disappeared beyond the nearest peak, and the sound of impact had echoed through the valley like thunder. Not the first thing from the sky to crash to the surface, but I investigated everything that crashed within the borders of our small, protected valley territory.
“Could be sky people,” Zelana said from my other side. The chief seer moved with careful precision. She’d learned to navigate the rough ground through long pilgrimages up here, with the intention to connect with ancestral spirits. The rest of her time was spent bent over ancient texts. Her silver-streaked hair was pulled back in the traditional braids of her position, and her clear blue eyes held that distant look that meant she was already spinning prophecies in her mind. “The signs from the sky have been warning of change. Of visitors.”
“No one in their right mind would visit this place,” Vax countered. “Unless it was an accident.”
I let them debate as we climbed higher, my own thoughts turning to the valley below.Myvalley. My clan. Thesanctuary we’d protected for a thousand cycles, hidden away from the chaos of the wider world.
A tower had stood once in the valley. A massive structure of gleaming metal and crystal that my ancestors said could control the very weather itself. They’d told stories of a time before the storms, when the sky was clear and the land beyond the mountains was green and thriving. Of war and death and endless fighting. But the tower had fallen in a great landslide, buried under half a mountain, and as the storms raged ever out of control beyond our borders, the valley remained calm and safe. And as the leader of my people, I would die to keep it that way.
We survived because the valley’s natural formation created a microclimate, a pocket of stability in the midst of chaos. But even that protection had limits. The storms were getting worse. I could feel it in the way the wind patterns had changed over the past few cycles, the way the temperature fluctuations grew more extreme. Our scouts reported seeing more lightning strikes, as if the sky itself was trying to tear holes in the world.
How much longer could we last, isolated and protected, while everything around us descended into madness?
“There.” One of the younger scouts pointed ahead, where smoke rose from behind a ridge of broken ice and stone. “The crash site.”
We spread out, weapons drawn. I pulled my blade from its sheath. The familiar weight of it was grounding, almost comforting. Whatever we found beyond that ridge, we would face it as we faced everything else. Together. Prepared.
A twist of metal lay crumpled against the mountainside. Ithad once been roughly oval-shaped, but now lay like a broken egg, half-buried in snow and debris. Thick metal panels had torn away during impact, exposing the interior to the brutal cold. Smoke still rose from damaged systems, and I could see the flicker of dying emergency lights through the cracked viewport.
“Check for life,” I ordered, already moving toward the wreckage. My instincts screamed at me to be careful, that this could be a trap, but something stronger pulled me forward. A heat in my chest that had nothing to do with exertion.
Vax reached the pod first, his bulk allowing him to force open the damaged hatch with a screech of protesting metal. He peered inside, then looked back at me with an expression of pure shock.
“Three survivors. Two are…” He stopped, staring. “Lord Rezor, their skin. The colorsshiftbut their eyes do not. And the third…” Another pause. “I don’t knowwhatit is.”
I was moving before he finished speaking, drawn by that inexplicable heat that was now spreading through my limbs like fire through dry grass. I pulled myself up to look through the hatch, and everything stopped.
The bright sunlight was at our backs, so the beings inside the craft could see only dark shapes of us. They spoke, but their language was strange, and I wasn’t listening to them anyway. I was taking in the sight before me.
Two creaturesdidlook almost like us.Almost. They had the right shape, the right build. But their skin shifted colors and ours did not. And their features held differences I couldn’t quite name. One was large, male, with orange and yellow patterns that rippled over him as he blinked up at us.The other was older, female, cradling an obviously broken arm, her skin flickering blue-green.
And between them, something I’d never seen nor imagined.
She was smaller than any of us, more delicate in build, with skin that didn’t shift colors at all. It stayed a warm brown tone, static and strange. Dark hair fell in tangled curls around a face that was both fascinating and completely alien. She was conscious and squinting at me with eyes the color of fertile soil, tense with pain and fear and something that looked a lot like defiance.
The heat in my chest exploded into an inferno.
I stumbled back from the hatch, my hand flying to my sternum where the sacred marks burned beneath my shirt. The marks that had been cold and dormant for all of my adult life, the marks that only warmed in the presence of…
No. Impossible.
“Rezor, I was right.” Zelana’s low voice cut through my shock. “Sky people.”
Sky people. My grandmother had spoken of them in her stories, and the seers still spent cycles trying to commune with them through visions and dreams. Old tales, passed down from ancestors, told of beings who fled into the sky in living ships, leaving behind those who couldn’t or wouldn’t go. We were the descendants of those who stayed, who adapted, who learned to survive in the valley while the world tore itself apart above. The seers believed in the prophecies that told of their return.
I humored the seers, but never truly put much weight in the prophecies that were recorded from old books and sacredmarkings. They were just stories. Old legends to explain why we were alone.
Vax’s hand fell on my shoulder. “What is it?” he asked. “Do you know what these beings are?”
I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t think past the fire racing through my veins, the way my marks pulsed with a rhythm that matched my thundering heartbeat. I didn’t want to believe these were the sky people from the old stories. The ones who fled in living ships. I didn’t want to imagine that they’d come back, because stars only knew what they’dwant.
